Latest Posts
Stalker
Time to rewatch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I thought, having recently seen Abel Ferrara’s Siberia (2019) and Gan Bi’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), and noticed how influenced both were by the 1979 film. As so many films are. Going backwards in time, just grabbing almost at random, there’s Stephen Fingleton’s amazing The Survivalist (2015), Alexey German’s Hard to Be a God (2015), Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) and Andrey Zvyangintsev’s The Return (2003). Almost all of Terrence Malick’s films owe a lot to Tarkovsky in general and Stalker in particular. Seminal, an overused term, is appropriate here. Let’s also mention Blade Runner, which appeared in 1982, three years after Stalker. While there … Read more
The Outside Story
Brian Tyree Henry goes from second string actor to star in The Outside Story. He’s probably best known from the TV series Atlanta, which has acted as a finishing school for talents including LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz. More recently you might have seen Henry’s face in Godzilla vs. Kong, as a nerdy conspiracy theorist. Writer/director Casimir Nozowski also gets an upgrade, having made a number of New York-centric shorts and directed a reality foodie show – and you can see the influence of both in The Outside Story. After a year of various levels of lockdowns, Henry is playing a character who’ll be familiar to many, as the video editor whose laptop-based … Read more
Bill & Ted Face the Music
Quick show of hands, did anyone actually ask for Bill & Ted Face the Music? Thought not, though here it is, around 30 years on from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and their Bogus Journey, back with its original stars, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, a good comedy director at the helm (Dean Parisot of Galaxy Quest fame), and with two talented draftees in there to provide new blood. In fact Reeves expressed an interest in a new instalment as long ago as 2005. Original writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon climbed back on board soon after, and the project was ready to go for about ten years – the studio wasn’t convinced a … Read more
Rising Phoenix
As the documentary Rising Phoenix makes clear, the rebranding of what were previously regarded as “disabled” people as a kind of army of X-Men type characters was what transformed the Paralympics. Before London 2012 the Paralympics had been a tacked-on event, the Cinderella of the Olympics. But suddenly the stadiums were full and the crowds were eager to see these remarkable people do their thing. Working like an extended version of one of those montage clips that big broadcasters like the BBC are so good at making when a big sporting event is in full roar, it’s a film of two parts. One tells the inspirational story of individual athletes and how they … Read more
The Mitchells vs the Machines
A cross-pollination of Deadpool and The Lego Movie might result in The Mitchells vs the Machines, a mad, meta-referential animation full of smart ideas and packed with enough jokes for repeat viewings. It’s refreshing, also, for a big Hollywood movie to be such a hymn (if hymns can be this busy) to weirdness. That’s largely down to co-writer/director Michael Rianda, who makes clear in the exit credits – with a big picture of his own family tagged “the real life Mitchells” – that this is a personal project. Perhaps idiosyncrasy is a better word than weirdness, let’s not get carried away, because in the telling of a story about a teenage movie-mad girl … Read more
Class Action Park
Class Action Park is a punning title for a reasonably even-handed documentary about Action Park, Vernon, New Jersey, a trailblazing theme park when it opened in the 1970s, which later became infamous on account of the number of accidents and deaths that happened there. It was the brainchild of Gene Mulvihill, a disgraced Wall Street trader who realised there was money to be made from a park that varied its offer with the seasons – by winter a ski resort, a water park in summer. “Uncle Gene” is what the teenagers in his employ affectionately called him, and it’s their testimony that forms the bulk of Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott’s film. … Read more
Lucid
Adam Morse’s feature debut, Lucid, is an ideas-driven supernatural drama that could almost double as an instructional video for shy boys who’d like to meet girls. In The Matrix style, it’s got a nerdy guy, Zel (Laurie Calvert) at its centre, an incel gamer whose mother (Sadie Frost) still hovers, concerned that her son isn’t getting out enough, worried that he’s never going to meet a nice girl if he doesn’t maintain normal standards of personal hygiene, even more worried that he can’t look a pretty woman in the eye without going to pieces if he’s got any interest in her at all. By night Zel has the sort of job shut-ins have … Read more
Waxworks
In probably the best condition it’s ever going to be seen, the Eureka Masters of Cinema 2019 restoration of Waxworks is a good 25 minutes shorter than the German original, all trace of which has disappeared. Instead, the Deutsche Kinemathek and Cineteca di Bologna took a surviving print from the British Film Institute and, using elements scavenged from around the world, put together this assemblage for a 2K restoration reinstating the original colour tinting. It’s a historically important film but also a vastly entertaining one, and if you’re a fan of German expressionism, it’s probably required viewing. The original German title, Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, is a clear nod to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, … Read more
The County
The County is yet more proof that Icelandic film-makers punch above their weight. Grímur Hákonarson is one of a band of modern Icelandic writer/directors including Benedikt Erlingsson (Of Horses and Men, Woman at War) and Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavík, The Deep) turning out films that manage to have something going on below the surface while also being entertaining. If Kormákur has recently gone a bit Hollywood (2 Guns, with Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, and currently finishing The Good Spy with Hugh Jackman), Hákonarson has stayed closer to home and more stereotypically “Icelandic”, like countryman Erlingsson. You might have seen Hákonarson’s excellent last film, Rams, which told the story of two ageing sheep-farmer … Read more
Salting the Battlefield
After the exotic holiday atmosphere of the second film, Turks & Caicos, the Worricker trilogy concludes with Salting the Battlefield. Writer/director David Hare takes us back, literally, to where he began gradually, starting the action out in Europe, where former agents and lovers Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) and Margot Tyrell (Helena Bonham Carter) are on the run, before swinging the focus back onto England, then London and finally the claustrophobic confines of the spying community and the upper echelons of the UK government. Familiar faces return – a heavily pregnant Felicity Jones as Worricker’s permanently angry estranged daughter Juliette, Saskia Reeves as Anthea Catcheside, the deputy prime minister wondering if her hour might be … Read more
Wet Season
More tales of emotional desperation from Anthony Chen, Wet Season follows 2013’s Ilo Ilo, using a couple of the same actors from his brilliant debut to squeeze a single drop of comfort from a scenario that would have been a full-bore histrionic melodrama in other hands. The returning actors are Koh Jia Ler, only 12 years old when he played the vile, utterly spoiled child in 2013, so about 18/19 in this film, as an attentive diligent student. Also back is Yeo Yann Yann, who was the vile child’s bitch of a mother in Ilo Ilo, and is now playing a thoughtful, dedicated teacher. Both are chalk and cheese transformations. Dysfunctional family life … Read more
Turks & Caicos
Turks & Caicos is the second of the Johnny Worricker trilogy of TV movies made by Carnival Films (of Downton Abbey fame) for the BBC and boasting the sort of cast that was still rare at small screen level in 2014. Christopher Walken and Winona Ryder are the properly big names, though Dylan Baker, Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves and Ewen Bremner (returning from the first movie) are hardly kitty litter. Ralph Fiennes, though present and correct, is only on screen for a few seconds and so doesn’t really count. For those coming in cold, there is absolutely no need to have watched the first one (Page Eight) to enjoy the second. All … Read more
